NASA to Use Chip-Sized Ships 100x Faster Than Usual Spacecraft

Size does count -- and the smaller, the better. At least for space. NASA and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) is planning to develop a small spacecraft made from a single silicon chip that can zip through interstellar speeds in a breath.

According to IEEE, NASA's Dong-IL Moon will be presenting the new technology aimed at ensuring such a spacecraft may survive the intense radiation it will encounter on its journey.

An i4u report stated that NASA believes using a silicon chip can produce vast amounts of speed needed to break through conventional methods. 

Calculations suggest it could even travel one-fifth the speed of light and reach the nearest stars in a matter of 20 years. This is 10 times faster than the conventional spacecraft.

Regardless, 20 years may still be too long for an ordinary silicon chip. Not only can it suffer from frailties on Earth such as temperature swings, radiation consisting of very high energy can lead to degradation of performance. This is because positive-charged defects in the chip's silicon dioxide layer can ruin its efficiency

The most serious of the impairments may be an increase in the current that leaks through a transistor when it's turned off. 

According to Particle News, there appears to be two options to address such a problem. First is to select a path in space that minimizes radiation exposure and add shielding. The former may lead to longer missions and constrain exploration. However, the latter adds weight and nullifies the advantage of a miniaturize craft.

A better approach is to let the devices suffer damage but add an extra contact to the transistors and use this to heal the devices with heating.

Jin-Woo Han explained that on-chip healing has been around for quite some time. Heating could drive the recovery of the radiation sensor, proven with the heat-induced healing of flash memory.

The study will be using KAIST's experimental "gate-all-around" nanowire transistors that use nanoscale wires as the transistor channel instead of the fin-shaped ones. The gate, the electrode that turns on or off the flow of charge around the channel, will be surrounding the nanowire. An extra contact allows you to pass current through i, and heats the gate and channel it surrounds, therefore healing radiation.

These transistors are ideal for space as they have a relatively high degree of immunity to cosmic rays and are very small. While this design may not be well-known yet, they may be seen in new rockets in the early 2020s. 

Cutting the costs of self-healing tech will be critical to the future of the program as it will help increase the appeal of the technology. It may require many more years of investment before the launch of the first silicon-chip spacecraft will take off.